Mike Angell
Folsom, CA
So I’m just an average white guy who grew up in an average white little farming town in Michigan. There were those that were outwardly racist and so, I was brought up to believe that this view was bad, which is most agreeable to everyone, at least outwardly. But it was never in the big obvious things where racism existed for me; it was in the “they’s” and “those people”. This was the culture and that culture has become apart of my own psyche, whether I wanted to or not. Now, to see someone who looks ‘different’ than me, feelings exist where there shouldn’t be any. When I’m conscious of it, I question it logically, because it never ‘logically’ makes any sense. I constantly struggle to disarm and dispel these unqualified emotional responses and in doing so, I must ignore and forget apart of the heritage and culture that I grew up with. I’m not really complaining, except that I had to learn this aspect of a culture in the first place.
